From Bryan Hoch:
Aaron Judge had to be nudged out of the dugout to accept a curtain call from the Yankee Stadium faithful, and it was one that was well-deserved. The Yankees captain’s climb toward history reached another significant checkpoint on Sunday, as he hit his 50th and 51st home runs in New York’s 10-3 win over the Rockies.
Judge reached the 50-homer plateau for the third time in his career and the second time in three seasons with a first-inning two-run blast off Austin Gomber.
The Yanks hit three consecutive homers in the seventh off Jeff Criswell, with Juan Soto, Judge and Giancarlo Stanton going back-to-back-to-back. As Judge rounded the bases, chants of “M-V-P!” were shouted throughout the big ballpark in the Bronx.
Marcus Stroman didn’t have a BAD game, but not good enough for a featured image. Instead, the amazing Aaron Judge got the nod with his 50th and 51st home run (I think the featured image is specifically the 50th home run).
The Yankees played down to the Rockies’ level, but in the end, they at least pulled away when it mattered most, and got the blowout victory, bringing their lead in the AL East back to 1.5 games, and a delightful EIGHT GAME lead over Boston in the loss column (nine game lead overall over Boston).
The bullpen was outstanding, and in notable bullpen news, the Yankees are clearly starting to get ready for the return of guys like Scott Efross, Lou Trivino, and Ian Hamilton, as they’ve DFAed Michael Tonkin in favor of a live arm, Phil Bickford, for tomorrow’s game (the Yankees don’t have an off day until Thursday). I imagine the idea is for Bickford to serve as a live arm if they need it tomorrow (after their bullpen was used a LOT in this Rockies series), and then DFA him whenever any of the three guys (Effross, Trivino and Hamilton) are ready. Come September 1st, they’ll add another (I suspect they’ll be slimy and not bring up Effross until September 1st, keeping him from adding any more service time), and then depending on what their thoughts are on Tim Mayza, they’ll add a third.
Tim Mayza seems like a case where they want to let Blake work with him a little bit more before they cut bait on him. I approve.
As you all know, I really liked Tonkin, but I can’t deny that he just simply isn’t as good as the other guys in the bullpen other than Mayza (and Mayza, as a lefty, is more intriguing to see if Blake can do something with him), and he is not better than the guys who are getting healthy, and since only Jake Cousins has options (and you can’t send Cousins down, as he’s been their best reliever recently, and making a case for being the closer), then the roster crunch is just too much. Tonkin will undoubtedly be picked up on waivers, and, well, I just hope it is by a team in the NL that the Yankees won’t play in the future. I think it speaks to how well the Yankees have developed some of their relievers, that a guy like Tonkin, who has been pretty good (including some big relief spots) is essentially the odd man out.
If only they wouldn’t let Clay Holmes close games….
I will argue that Judge is the greatest hitter of all-time. 1) It’s not just one season. It’s close to three now. 2) Due to injuries and a late debut, he won’t likely amass the totals of guys who played for 20 years. 3) He’s facing toughest pitchers ever, with all of them throwing 95+ and with ridiculous spin – some pitches look like wiffle balls. 4) he’s not using steroids/PEDs.
Career slugging:
Bonds – .606
Judge – .606
Transport Judge back to 1927 and he’d hit .450 with 90 HRs
You may be right. He really might be that – the best hitter ever.
Say that and savor it.
Not long enough yet, but this span is staggering. And watching him do it, you can really believe he can maintain this level.
_
(FWIW, Bonds, Sosa, McGuire, etc., who cheated us of seeing what they were actually capable of, shouldn’t be considered – the stats for that era make it obvious that they’ve removed themselves from any rational comparison, both in terms of performance and longevity. If we’re being honest, Judge has the MLB home run record right now.)
That is crazy. Slugging like Bonds on steroids – without steroids.
But Babe Ruth might’ve had a nutritionist and hitting coaches and computers and spent summers at a baseball camp. If you put baby Babe in a Time Machine and sent him to the year 2000 and gave him to an upper middle class family what would he be?
Well that’s the thing isn’t it. Maybe in the year 2000 the Babe does steroids!
And Ruth wouldn’t have had to face spitballers and a whole slew of other ball doctorers. Which is a huge deal, actually.
Spitballs.
And they kept balls in play a lt longer, so baseballs with dark marks on them or scuffs not made by pitchers or catchers were kept in play unless they went into the stands. Baseballs hit fair and that didn’t go into the stands were kept in play. Now, how many balls do they use in a game? A batter can ask a new ball be used,
I was at the game yesterday. First time at the Stadium in 10 years and Judge did not disappoint. It was nice to see some of the other guys besides Soto chip in for a change. Maybe Gleyber can go out on a high note. Coincidently I was at Shea Stadium in ’98 for a double header and saw McGwire hit 50 and 51. Judge is still behind McGwire’s pace for the season, but if he can keep up his recent pace of a HR per game he should get to 70. Go Judge!
John, so cool. You chose your game well!
Considering Jay Jaffe’s framework of weighting peak and career stats equally, Judge is pretty clearly establishing a HOF-caliber peak. The key to whether Judge gets the career totals to end up an inner-circle HOF will be health. Even if he can stay healthy for half his remaining contract then he’s likely to approach 500 HR but not 600. If he follows the usual non-steroid MLB curve then his decline could start very soon. But if he stays healthy for the next 7 years, he could approach Mays if not Ruth. We just don’t know whether someone so big will develop chronic/recurrent issues on account of his size; or whether there’s something about his body (say, high endogenous HGH levels) that might help it recover more quickly.
Meanwhile, he’s a hell of a ballplayer and incredibly fun to watch, and he deserves teammates who are good and want to win.
“pretty clearly establishing a HOF-caliber peak”
This seems like a masterful application of (pseudo-)british understatement.
He deserves an owner who wants to win.
I gotta throw this out there – how do we know judge isn’t using something? (Ducks head to avoid thrown objects)
A friend told me that judge is like that 6th grade little leaguer who was 6 feet tall. By high school everyone else catches up but for a couple years he is the biggest strongest guy on the field and dominates. The difference here is no one on catching up. Except eventually Father Time.
There literally isn’t a single MLB player that would shock me if you told me they were using something.
This is the thing about steroids, they don’t make you a good baseball player. I could take every shot in the world now, or when I was 18, and I wouldn’t be a good ballplayer.
Only thing we know is that if he is using something, either he hasn’t been caught by the testing regime, or he has a doctor’s prescription (as some players with ADHD get for amphetamines).
The testing regime does catch some people, but I suspect it wouldn’t be able to catch transgenic juicers – for instance, introducing a replication-incompetent adeno-associated virus that infects liver cells, integrates safely into their genome, and stably expresses HGH (or, say, some enzyme that increases testosterone biosynthesis). I thought for a while that the Boston/Cambridge biotech nerds could have done this for David Ortiz.
I suppose transgenic juicing could also be done transiently, and hence more safely, with mRNA instead of a virus; but not sure the dosing schedule that would be required.
While PEDs don’t guarantee hand-eye coordination, they do help you swing faster (hence hitting harder), and they may help you square a ball up better since you can wait a hair longer to choose your pitch. And based on bat tracking data, Judge is just league average on squared-up rate; his big advantage is in swing speed; he’s not like Soto who excels in both, or Stanton who has high bat speed but low squared-up rate.
They wouldn’t be able to get it from bat-tracking data, but I wonder if video of Bonds in 1998 vs 2001 would reveal a change in bat speed. A league average swing lasts 150 ms, and at the standard 30fps, it might be tough to resolve that difference…
I think super-slomo postdates 1998 and 2001 but there’s probably some 60fps or even 120 fps footage out there. I still don’t know if that would do it though
Nothing would shock me, but I think you’re underestimating they sophistication of just one side (the testing).
And the notion that steroids don’t make you a better ballplayer is absurd. Every analysis of the stats of that era show very clearly that they did. They don’t make YOU, Veggie, into Babe Ruth – but better than you were without them? In any event, it did that in clearly trackable ways for a series of players over a clearly identifiable epoch, and that epoch ended with a crash, in the blink of an eye, when the testing was introduced.
It made them better players.
“they don’t make you a good baseball player”
Nobody claims steroids would turn Eddie Gaedel into Aaron Judge. The claim never was that steroids elevate anybody’s and everybody’s performance to one and the same superhuman level, irrespective of your initial level. No one ever claimed that if you take a shot, you’ll automatically become Babe Ruth. Aiming your argument against that never-made claim is, again, a straw man argument of the most radical kind.
The claim is merely that they can enhance your performance, sometimes very significantly. The statistics of an era attest eloquently to the fact that this claim was, in fact, borne out in real life.
Back in the day, when Mad Dog as doing the show alone one summer week, with Mike on vacation, a professor called in and told Russo that he had tracked every Bonds HR and that the distances had increased by ~30 feet on average from a certain timeframe. Russo listened, and had along conversation with the guy.
Adding such distance to a fly ball, and McGuire and Sosa were the same, greatly increases the chance of an out into a HR.
There have been articles about the distortion of that era on every statistically oriented baseball site. I could go dig some of them up again, I suppose. But I don’t think it’s even faintly controversial at this point.
Think I may not have been clear, Pete – I agree steroids can increase strength, and that they made Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, ARod, Palmeiro, Clemens, etc better ballplayers for longer. They worked for Pud Galvin and a bunch of people ever since, including some legendary ones and some others who never had more than a cup of coffee.
It’s pretty obvious and should not be controversial that anabolic steroids –> muscle growth –> strength –> bat speed –> exit velo –> distance.
WIth the improved bat speed, a player can also wait longer to start his swing, and may have more time to recognize a pitch better, which impacts his ability to square up the ball better (and to swing vs take).
But I’m not aware of evidence that steroids improve vision itself, or hand-eye coordination.
(Somewhat off topic, I’ve always suspected that Jason Giambi’s pituitary tumor was iatrogenic – which would be a case of PEDs worsening vision – but I’ve never asked an endocrinologist about it.)
Anyway, I would not be surprised if transgenic juicers are already playing, but I would be quite surprised if the first ones are caught by testing rather than investigative work.
And since you asked, juicing wouldn’t turn me into Babe Ruth, but it might turn me into Odwalla Cabrera.
Yes, that all makes perfect sense. And of course I have no reason to think that steroids improve vision, and that’s never been the argument, anyway. They surely increase hand-eye coordination, I think – from the hand side. And you pretty much make a version of that argument.
I mean, think of it this way: if you’re a normal person and you try to swing a full-sized I beam, you’ll look pretty clumsy, because you can hardly lift it, let alone swing it more easily. The lighter it gets (or the stronger you get), they more easily you’ll manipulate it, and obviously you’ll be better able to coordinate its movement to what you see. So in that regard, you’d think it would make it easier to square up a ball, and with a heavier bat.
Also, juiced pitchers allegedly mean faster pitches providing power for harder hits. The list of effects goes on and on.
But I want to stress that even if some of this were proven wrong, it would just mean only a flaw in my explanation of the results we have. It wouldn’t change those results in the slightest.
Bonds started juicing as soon as he went to San Francisco (I believe his then teammate Matt Williams showed him the way). The area has been a hotbed of guys developing such things since at least in the 1960s.
Bonds was happy and then McGuire and Sosa started going crazy using whatever it was and Bonds got jealous and went beyond crazy in his juicing. Remember, he was doing things age 37-40 that no one but Ruth did in his prime.
Then there was MLB allowing Bonds to stand inside the strike zone, while wearing a massive piece of armor on his right elbow. He was cheating in plain sight by where he stood in the batters box! And MLB allowed him to get away with it.
Didn’t Boston have a guy who was better ages 36-40 than 31-35?
The guy who was shot in the DR? Yeah.
No more arguing about steroids. we all believe what we believe, we can’t change anything and MLB isn’t gonna change the stats. And here we were having an awesome conversation about the Marvel Aaron Judge.
If they would walk Judge as they did Bonds he might be even better. Even before his crazy years, Bonds got IBBd way more than Judge.
IBBs through age 32:
Bonds: 260, 7,400 PA
Judge: 64, 4,196 PA
Judge would have 80(!!) more walks at Bonds’ pace!
p.s. – is there a Marvel superhero type oun name for Judge? Felt like almost a thing.
So a much higher OBP but fewer HRs due to fewer at bats. And fewer outs. Would it make him better? Would the Yankees be better off?
“we all believe what we believe”
That’s like an assertion that we won’t listen to each other and that the most reasonable argument can’t change anyone’s mind. I very much hope that’s completely untrue for me, and for the rest of us. In fact, I’m pretty confident it’s largely untrue, thank God.
Not that I wasn’t enjoying the pre-steroids Judge convo!
In fact, many statistically oriented people think steroids made no difference and that it was a juiced ball
Oh, maybe I’ll go dig up some of the articles.
_
But it would make for an interesting conspiracy theory – that their recalibration of the balls was carefully timed to coincide with the institution of the drug testing regime!
It wasn’t a juiced ball that saw Bonds looking like a Hulk Hogan type in those years, or Bonds openly cheating and MLB allowing it when he basically stood in the strike zone while wearing a massive piece of body armor on his left arm.
The 2019 season saw 6776 HR’s, no individual player was hitting 60, 65, 70+ HR’s let alone several players.
https://www.baseball-almanac.com/hitting/hihr6.shtml
The game has started, Gleyber with a leadoff HR. Soto BB, Judge DP, Stanton lines out to first.
Judge is killing us in the first. They need to move him down to the five or six or they’ll just walk Soto every AB.
Very nice catch Alex.